The Road to Damascus | Page 5

like THE
STRANGER, really gives the impression of having been a visionary.
For instance, his author friend Albert Engström, has told how one
evening during a stay far out in the Stockholm skerries, far from all
civilisation, Strindberg suddenly had a feeling that his little daughter
was ill, and wanted to return to town at once. True enough, it turned out
that the girl had fallen ill just at the time when Strindberg had felt the
warning. As regards thought-reading, it appears that at the slightest
change in expression and often for no perceptible reason at all,
Strindberg would draw the most definite conclusions, as definite as
from an uttered word or an action. This we have to keep in mind, for
instance, when judging Strindberg's accusations against his wife in Le
Plaidoyer d'un Fou, the book which THE LADY in The Road to
Damascus is tempted to read, in spite of having been forbidden by THE
STRANGER, with tragic results. In
Part III of the drama Strindberg lets THE
STRANGER discuss this thought-reading problem with his first wife.
THE STRANGER says:
'We made a mistake when we were living together, because we accused
each other of wicked thoughts before they'd become actions; and lived
in mental reservations instead of realities. For instance, I once noticed
how you enjoyed the defiling gaze of a strange man, and I accused you
of unfaithfulness';
to which THE LADY, to Strindberg's satisfaction, has to reply:
'You were wrong to do it, and right. Because my thoughts were sinful.'
As regards the other figures in the gallery of characters in
Part I, we have already shown THE LADY
as the identical counterpart in

all essentials of Strindberg's second wife, Frida Uhl. Like the latter
THE LADY is a Catholic, has a grandfather, Dr. Cornelius
Reisch--called THE OLD MAN in the drama--whose passion is
shooting; and a mother, Maria Uhl, with a predilection for religious
discourses in Strindberg's own style; another detail, the fact that she
was eighteen years old before she crossed to the other shore to see what
had shimmered dimly in the distant haze, corresponds with Frida Uhl's
statement that she had been confined in a convent until she was
eighteen and a half years old. On the other hand, the chief female
character of the drama does not correspond to her real life counterpart
in that she is supposed to have been married to a doctor before eloping
with THE STRANGER, Strindberg. Here reminiscences from
Strindberg's first marriage play a part. Siri von Essen, Strindberg's first
wife, was married to an officer, Baron Wrangel, and both the Wrangels
received Strindberg kindly in their home as a friend. Love quickly
flared up between Siri von Essen-Wrangel and Strlndberg. She
obtained a divorce from her husband and married Strindberg. Baron
von Wrangel shortly afterwards married again, a cousin of Siri von
Essen. Knowing these matrimonial complications we understand how
Strindberg must have felt when, on the point of leaving for Heligoland
to marry Frida Uhl, he met his former wife's (Siri von Essen) first
husband, Baron Wrangel, on Lehrter Station in Berlin, and found that,
like Strindberg himself, he was on a lover's errand. Knowing all this we
need not be surprised at the extremely complicated matrimonial
relations in The Road to Damascus, where, for example, for the sake of
THE STRANGER, THE DOCTOR obtains a divorce from THE LADY
in order to marry THE STRANGER'S first wife. In addition to Baron
Wrangel a doctor in the town of Ystad, in the south of Sweden--Dr.
Eliasson who attended Strindberg during his most difficult period-- has
stood as a model for THE DOCTOR. We note in particular that the
description of the doctor's house enclosing a courtyard on three sides,
tallies with a type of building which is characteristic of the south of
Sweden. When THE DOCTOR ruthlessly explains to THE
STRANGER that the asylum, 'The Good Help,' was not a hospital but a
lunatic asylum, he expresses Strindberg's own misgivings that the St.
Louis Hospital, of which, as mentioned above, Strindberg was an
inmate in the beginning of the year 1895, was really to be regarded as a

lunatic asylum.
Even minor characters, such as CAESAR and THE BEGGAR have
their counterparts in real life, even though in the main they are fantastic
creations of his imagination. The guardian of his daughter, Kerstin, a
relative of Frida Uhl's, was called Dr. Cäsar R. v. Weyr. Regarding
THE BEGGAR it may be enough to quote Strindberg's feelings when
confronted with the collections made by his Paris friends:
'I am a beggar who has no right to go to cafés. Beggar! That is the right
word; it rings in my ears and brings a burning blush to my cheeks, the
blush of shame, humiliation, and rage!
'To